XML is rapidly emerging as the de-facto standard for transmitting data structures between software applications and web services. While most software applications and web services are written in modern programming languages, such as Java or C++, none of these programming languages provide native support for representing and manipulating XML. Consequently, programmers are forced to develop or adopt external software packages for representing and manipulating XML within the context of their applications and web services.
In general, external software packages are not capable of providing the host language with native support for processing XML data. As such, they represent and manipulate XML in ways that are quite different than those provided by the host language for its native data types. Most often, external software packages represent XML data using a general purpose tree abstraction and provide a tree-based application programming interface (API) for navigating and manipulating the data (e.g., getParentNode( ), getChildNodes( ), removeChild( ), etc.). Additionally, there are different processing models such as DOM, XSLT, XQuery, etc that can introduce a steep learning curve for the developer community as these models require specialized knowledge and cumbersome concepts of trees, nodes, recursive decent, etc. This method of accessing and manipulating data structures is cumbersome and time consuming compared to methods used for accessing and manipulating data structures native to the host programming language.
Therefore, a programming language that enables the integration and manipulation thereafter of external schema and types of data representation language such as XML with the same power and flexibility afforded by native data structures is desirable. This is particularly useful for untyped native programming or scripting languages. This enables programmers and web developers to use the power of XML structured data, allowing them to leverage their existing skills, and reuse familiar programming concepts (operators and syntax). By allowing the facility to manipulate and use external schema and types in the native language reduces code complexity, time to market, cost of development and testing, and decreases code footprint requirements.